"I had seven names in all: imbecile, donkey, flax-head, dope, glump, ninny and fool," Gimpel begins, sounding more like Augie March than someone from the old country.
In his review of Florence Noiville's biography of Isaac Bashevis Singer (Dec. 24), D. T. Max quotes from Saul Bellow's English translation of Singer's "Gimpel the Fool": "I had seven names in all: imbecile, donkey, flax-head, dope, glump, ninny and fool".
But it betrays a self-conscious fabrication which exposes its theatrical tricks.The story is that of a Czech pianist who is separated from his wife in Prague when he is taken by the Nazis for playing the forbidden Smetana "Moldau". After undemonstrated brutalization and all of this is described in flashback he turns up, a refugee imbecile, in the French island of Guadalupe.
In America "imbeciles" and "defectives" were segregated and sterilised until the 1960s.
You look at the average person--his or her beliefs, the huge cathedrals built for them, the religions that maintain order, the rubbish that people believe in, the imbeciles who can influence millions, the rover on Mars searching for water--it is very obvious to me that most people are actually mad.
"Look who's grinning like an imbecile in the dead heat of noon," the lieutenant said, shaking his head.
Do you have an imbecile in your department?" To which the man replied: "Well... there is Wodehouse".
To one of the grouchiest of those, let me just reply that there are only two "e's" in the word "imbecile".
He had been "the lead imbecile in Friday night's free-for-all", but he would still make a worthy addition to Vaccaro's local team, the New York Knicks.
Former President Nicolas Sarkozy famously lamented, for instance, that "La Princesse de Clèves," a 17th-century novel, had been included by a "sadist or an imbecile" in an examination for entry-level state administrative posts.
